There Are No Child Sex Slaves at My Local Pizza Parlor

By Alexandra Zapruder

Dec. 10, 2016

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Inside Comet Ping Pong, the Washington pizzeria that’s become a target because of fake-news stories.CreditCreditChad Bartlett for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — On any given day, locals flock to Comet Ping Pong, a pizza joint here not far from where I live, to eat, talk and, of course, play Ping-Pong. But last Sunday, a man armed with a military-style assault rifle and a pistol turned up for an entirely different reason: to see for himself whether the restaurant was indeed, as right-wing fake news reports and conspiracy websites have declared, the hub of a vile child sex-slavery ring masterminded by Hillary Clinton.

The absurdity of this story would be laughable if it hadn’t led a man to bring a rifle to a restaurant filled with families. And if it hadn’t resulted in an army of online terrorists harassing the owner, his employees and others along that block of Connecticut Avenue, accusing them of unspeakable crimes and even issuing death threats.

I’ve seen my share of conspiracy theories. My grandfather, who accidentally took a home movie of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — now known as the Zapruder film — was implicated in some of the most delusional stories about that event: He had colluded with the C.I.A. to allow his film to be altered just days after the assassination; he had secret ties to Lee Harvey Oswald through a co-worker who later married Oswald’s close friend; and, wait for it, he was the one who pulled the trigger through an elaborate gun-as-camera mechanism at the bidding of the Jewish Mafia.

The government’s failure, in the historian Art Simon’s words, to come up with “a coherent and believable account of the assassination” left many gaps to be filled. While early assassination researchers performed a valuable function by making important information public, later conspiracy theorists relied on association and innuendo and cherry-picked details to build increasingly wild narratives.

If one outcome of Kennedy’s assassination was a loss of trust in government and the news media, we have now entered an era in which such suspicions have mushroomed into something far more dangerous — a rupture in the very idea of shared truth.

The crisis at Comet was averted when the gunman surrendered to the police before anyone was hurt. But the deeper problem remains. We are no longer talking about a relatively small group of Kennedy conspiracy theorists trading notes and publishing articles. We are talking about millions who are reading Reddit and 4chan, imbibing fabricated stories attributed to fictitious publications like The Denver Guardian and getting whipped into a fury of self-righteous anger that — given the easy access to guns in our society — may well result in violence.

Is there any way to reverse this trend? The mainstream news media can’t do a thing. If I learned one thing from trying to understand the Kennedy conspiracy theorists, it’s that it is impossible to dispel the amorphous cloud of suspicion. If you try, you are either a dupe or part of the cover-up — the cloud simply grows to include you. Nor, needless to say, is anyone from the Democratic Party going to be able to reason with those who are convinced that Mrs. Clinton is organizing a child sex-slave network through a pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington.

The president-elect, on the other hand, could make a difference. But Donald J. Trump and his team have legitimized rather than repudiated this kind of speculation. He embraced the so-called birther movement, claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating after the Sept. 11 attacks and tweeted that millions voted “illegally” for Mrs. Clinton. Just before the election, his pick for national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, fanned the flames of the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy by tweeting about Mrs. Clinton and sex crimes and providing a link to a fake-news article.

If Mr. Trump does nothing, could our new neighbor, Mike Pence, speak up? How about the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell; the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan; or Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and future chief of staff to the president? Surely they see that assaults on truth are harmful to all of us, regardless of our political orientation. Why haven’t they and other responsible conservatives condemned these lies on the grounds that no one is safe in a world in which facts no longer have merit?

They should. And they should do it at Comet Ping Pong. They should stand in front of the restaurant and say that no matter how vehemently you disagree with Mrs. Clinton’s politics, there is no justification for accusing her of child trafficking. They should condemn “fake news” — which is a weak term for deep hatred that takes the form of a story — and encourage their supporters to do the same.

Is there any world in which this could happen? It depends on whether Republicans think vilifying Mrs. Clinton serves their interests. It depends on whether they accept that there is such a thing as truth and that we are morally obligated to defend it. This may be a political problem for our Republican friends, but it shouldn’t be a moral one.

They should stand up for the truth. Then stay for the pizza. And let’s put this madness behind us.

Alexandra Zapruder is the author of “Twenty Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film.”